The village emerged as a stopover station on the highway between Moscow and Ryazan (present-day M5 road), and its population and economy traditionally tended to horses.

In the 1780s the administrative reform of Catherine the Great turned the village into a proper small town with a grid plan and a growing merchant community.

Its key landmarks are the five-domed cathedral of Archangel Michael (completed in 1705), the church of Entry into Jerusalem (1845) and the neoclassical cavalry barracks.

[11] The latter version is supported by the fact that another, and older, village once named Bronnitsy, present-day Bronnitsa on Msta River, also evolved as a yam station.

[18] In 1618 Hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, acting in accord with Władysław IV Vasa, stayed in Bronnitsy on his march from Serpukhov to Moscow.

[19] Romanovs of the 17th century maintained Bronnitsy merely as a household item[19] and the village evolved in relative prosperity, evidenced by the construction of the Cathedral of Archangel Michael, launched in the 1690s and completed in 1705.

[19] He granted Bronnitsy to Alexander Menshikov;[11] after his fall in 1727 control over the village and government-owned stud farms passed to statesman Pavel Yaguzhinsky who "managed" the business into a ruin.

Everyday life of the town in the 17th and 18th centuries remains, largely, unknown, apart from a few unusual events that attracted attention of the imperial government.

For example, when nearby Kolomna was hit by the plague of 1770–1772, the priests of Bronnitsy refused to respect quarantine enforced by civil authorities and kept on organizing potentially hazardous mass processions.

[18] Catherine the Great granted the former village a town charter and a coat of arms featuring golden horse on a green field, a nod to Bronnitsy stud farms.

After the surrender of Moscow on September 14, the main Russian Army retreated south-east along the Ryazan road, "cautiously"[23] shadowed by Murat's cavalry.

On September 17 Kutuzov made a sharp westward turn to Podolsk; a small task force continued movement to Ryazan, impersonating the whole army.

[26] Murat's raid, accompanied with inevitable plunder and fires, was the last foreign incursion into Bronnitsy ever (World War II spared the town).

[27] Rotunda of Jerusalem church, standing near the Cathedral of Archangel Michael, was built in the 1840s by Alexander Shestakov in late neoclassical style.

[30] Residents were eagerly leaving Bronnitsy for industrial and service jobs in Moscow: by 1882, Bronnitsky, Podolsky, Serpukhovsky, and Moskovsky Uezds were the leading suppliers of manpower to the metropolis.

[33] Bronnitsy gradually became a minor textile industry hub and its factories employed a substantial share of the remaining population,[33] especially under-age girls.

[37] Mayor Alexander Pushkin (the third) struggled to improve the performance of peasant households; increase in average area of a family lot, he reasoned, would enable a switch from obsolete three-field crop rotation to intensive farming methods.

During the 1905 Russian Revolution liberal-minded teachers and medics supported the political changes while the peasants distrusted their promises, fearing a return to dreaded serfdom system.

[39] On one occasion the peasants stormed and burnt down a school building housing a convention of zemstvo employees who barely escaped the mob.

Population, however, remained superstitious: in 1926 Bronnitsy were swept with an outbreak of alleged demonic possession blamed on a local homosexual healer.

[43] The temples of Bronnitsy were closed in the 1930s and used as archives;[44] they were struck off heritage register during Nikita Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign,[45] but survived to date.

[49] Front-line action did not reach Bronnitsy but the town and country lost so many men that after the war the government resorted to returning "political" prisoners of Gulag to take up administrative jobs.

[56] The town's revenue for 2010 is set at around fifteen million US dollars; around half of it is collected locally through taxes, the balance is remitted from regional and federal funds.

Silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix), released in 1993, survived and established a viable population despite very long sexual maturity period (12 to 13 years in Belskoe Lake).